Towards morning we were awakened by our friends the kakapos, who in their frolics seemed to forget the respect due to the featherless bipeds, and scampered right over our heads. Putting out my hand half an hour or so later, I felt a gentle rain falling, and there was a small pool of water in the folds of Ziele’s sleeping bag. The weather had again broken, and there was nothing for it but to return to the huts and try another time. The mist was thick in the valley and all the mountains were blotted out, but the booming of the avalanches indicated clearly that the Jervois Glacier was still alive and kicking. We waited an hour after daylight, and then, squirming out of our sleeping bags, made a hurried breakfast and marched off in single file down to the Beech Huts. On arrival there we found that Fyfe and Hodgkins had started down the Milford Sound track to see if they might by any chance fall in with the Government road-making party, who we knew must be camped not many miles away. Hodgkins returned in the afternoon with the intelligence that a party of fourteen men were camped about a mile and a half down the valley, that they had almost run short of provisions, and had been for some weeks without news of the outside world. As the day wore on, the rain came down heavier and heavier, and by nighttime we fully realized that the climate on the western side of the divide could be “demned moist and unpleasant” when it chose. Our supply of bread now ran out, but luckily we had taken some flour over the pass, and my wife was kept busy baking scones to supply the wants of six hungry men with fully developed appetites. It was rather interesting to watch the evolution of the methods of camp cookery, but let us hear the cook herself on so important a matter:—
“It was with some trepidation,” she says, “that I decided that afternoon to bake bread. At home, I am considered a good cook, even by those who suffer under my experiments, but here things were different. The commissariat department included self-raising flour,—one is fairly sure of a success with that,—and I was fortunate enough in the first hut to find a tin basin to mix my dough in.
“My husband had, before starting, objected, on the score of weight, to the handle of the common domestic frying-pan that figured among our utensils. It was decided to break it off and put two light curved wire handles across. To make it still lighter, only one of these handles was brought, and the consequence was that the pan, if anyone winked or coughed, tipped up suddenly. My dough looked beautifully light as I patted it gently into the hanging pan. Stokers there were in plenty, and I felt sure of success as I saw the cream-white bubbles rise on the surface. Two of the party were building castles in the air, sitting on the bench in front of the fire, gloating over the idea of fresh bannocks for their tea. For but one moment—one hapless moment—I left my scone to wash the basin at the door, one short step away from the hearth. When I returned, the pan had ignominiously ejected its contents into the very middle of the fire, and then had righted itself again. I demanded of the two, who still sat gloomily gazing, why was this thus; but they told me they thought I was running the show, or words to that effect. The three of us set disconsolately to work with spoons to fish up some of the dough. I deposited a spoonful or two of it in the frying-pan, where it burnt, and smelt so strong that another member of the party came rushing in with his appetite in full play. ‘Well,’ he said cheerily, ‘how did your scone turn out?’ I stared solemnly, spoon in hand, and told him that it had turned out all right; but not in the manner expected! However, they let me down lightly over this first faux pas in camp cookery, and I hid the charred remnants with the meat-tins where the rats ran riot behind the hut, and, no doubt, made short work of them.
“It was always interesting on arrival at a hut to inspect the kitchen utensils. As a rule it did not take long. We left the hapless frying-pan behind in one hut hoping to find in another a substitute. I pounced eagerly upon three small cake-tins, and determined to utilize them. They did very well, though of rather thin metal. An enamel plate I also used returned, I regret to say, from the furnace minus the enamel. Of course, these were simply placed on the embers, which had constantly to be raked out from beneath the great mossy logs at the back of the fireplace. Now and again culinary operations had to be stopped, as the wooden chimney had a little habit of going on fire; but a man inside with one bucket of water, and another outside with a second bucket, soon extinguished the conflagration. We got quite used to it at last. It was terribly hot work raking out the embers and watching the bread, and I always got a volunteer for that. I sort of superintended. These scones were really very good; but the best plan was hit upon towards the end of our trip. One awesome night, dark as pitch, when I lay awake in the hut and listened to the rain pouring and the rush of Roaring Creek as it carried its rain-swollen waters into the Arthur River, my thoughts veered round to the perennial scone. The rats that night were holding high carnival. They had discovered some figs in my swag. Among the bric-à-brac in the men’s hut, which was our kitchen, dining-room, and drawing-room in one, I had noticed a frying-pan with a large hole in the bottom. This inverted over the baking tins, a piece of tin covering the hole, and then thickly covered with hot embers, would be a great improvement on our present method, and this also would save the trouble of turning. Next day, when tried, the plan proved a great success, and much less bother than the other way. La nuit porte conseil, the French say. It was so in this case.”
We had heavy rain now, and on our journey down to the Sound had to wade nearly waist-deep through strong-running streams. We were hospitably received at the roadmen’s camp, albeit they were running short of provisions. At one time they had run out of tea, and had to be content with hot water, while now they had neither sugar, butter, nor jam, but were obliged to rest satisfied with dry bread and tinned meats. To add to their troubles, they had a cook who was no cook, and whose mental balance, never very well adjusted, had in these solitary places developed a decided kink. He eyed us with a weird look, half of suspicion and half curiosity. We had noted, in passing, near the cook-house, a crooked log partially hollowed out, and we now learnt that this was a primitive canoe which the cook in his spare moments was laboriously fashioning with the avowed object of making a voyage to the better land.
It would have been a cranky craft in any case, and, had he trusted his body to it, there can be no doubt that his contemplated journey to the better land would have been somewhat shorter than he anticipated. However, instead of voyaging on the troubled waters of the Arthur River, he wandered off at midnight down the track to Lake Ada. He returned next day, but went straight to his bed, and refused to cook any more. When asked what possessed him to make this midnight journey, he merely remarked that he had heard the Lord calling him. Some of the men wished he had gone in his canoe.
Our journey down the valley after the heavy rains afforded us a wonderful sight. The Arthur River, swollen to three times its normal size, roared over the rapids, and flowed swiftly along the more level reaches, while adown the granite walls of the splendid valley hundreds of waterfalls of great variety in height, in volume, and in beauty came madly rushing or softly falling as the case might be—
“A land of streams! Some, like a downward smoke,
Slow-dropping veils of thinnest lawn, did go;